How to deal with CC as a paladin tank (Guide to seting up your pulls)

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As a freshly dinged paladin tank your gear is not good enough to just let every mob bash into you mindlessly, your nowhere near the avoidance cap and healers are struggling to keep you up. This is the moment to start using the crow control in your dungeon groups properly. Luckily for us, almost every class has a form of crowd control it's now about learning how to use those forms of crowd control. Some will break on damage, some will be able to take some damage while others are completely immune to your damage. These factors all influence how you should setup your crowd control.

Crowd Control
Let's start this guide of with a short introduction to all the possible ways of crowd controlling. I will go over the more common ways of crowd control you will find in your dungeons:

Mage - Polymorph, the bread and butter under de crowd control, easily used, fast cast. Will break on any damage.
Hunter - Freezing Trap, can be shot under a mob with a trap launcher, contains the mob for about a minute, needs to be reapplied in due time. Will break on any damage.
Warlock - Fear (with Glyph of Fear), will make the mob cower in fear on a fixed location, can be reapplied fast, will break after some damage.
Warlock- Banish (demons/elementals), will make the mob immune to all damage and takes it out of the fight. Can be reapplied very easier. Will not break on damage.
Priest - Shackle Undead, will stop a mob from attacking and moving, can be reapplied quite easily. Will break on any damage.
Druid - Hibernate, will put a beast or dragonkin in a state of sleep, making sure that the mob wont attack. Will break on any damage.
Druid - Entangling Roots, will make a mob unable to move, however it will not stop the mob from attacking, will break on a moderate amount of damage. Never use this on a caster, the mob will just keep on attacking from range, best used on melee mobs. Do not go close to them else they will still be able to attack you.
Shaman - Hex, will turn humanoids and beasts into a frog, making them unable to attack. Can be reapplied easily and will break on moderate amount of damage.

As you might have noticed I am avoiding Sap in the list of crowd controls this is due to the fact, it can only be applied once since after that the target will be in combat.

The Pull
Depending on the amount of crowd control you have available it's wise to setup your pull in a certain fashion. Your avengers shield will ignore pure CCéd targets. Sheep/Trap/Hex. It tend to however still hit any other form of crowd control, therefor giving you the possibility to break that CC. Which of course is a bad thing. Since most paladin tanks like to pull with the avenger shield, that is right what we will be doing. We will just setup our CC in such a manner it does not break other kinds of CC.

The trick to the perfect CC pull is to cover your fragile CC, the CC that breaks easily on damage, by CC that doesn’t break on damage. On the targets you want CCéd for sure make use of sheep/trap since your shield will ignore those. The main point is to cover the other CC.

If you have multiple fragile CC with you, use that on the outside mobs in a string of mobs, then cover it up with a sheep in the middle. This way if you throw your shield to the most outer edge, it will stop at the sheep. Pulling those 2/3 mobs out of the packs right to you, since they are silenced. While the other mobs should be CCéd safely in the back. Try practising this in normal modes first. You will soon find out which CC covers other CC and makes it a lot easier to pull off those nasty pulls in heroics.

Breaking it
So you targets are dead and you have a couple of CCéd targets up, what will you break first? Go for the mobs that hardest to reCC first, quite often that will be the trapped target or the root. Then work your way from target to target. I found it tremendously easy to bind skull to my mouse button so people can see which target to attack, and that way I don’t have to go through the interface just to put up a CC.

Final Words
With these tips/knowledge it should be a lot easier for you to setup your pull/cc, try to be creative and make those heroics a lot easier on your healers!